Ali Jafari (jafari@iupui) has worked in the fields of Information Technology
and Multimedia since 1985 as a software designer, system engineer, technology
architect, professor and researcher. He has worked in various engineering,
administrative and academic positions at the Indiana University Bloomington
and IUPUI campuses. He is currently Director of the IUPUI CyberLab and
Professor of Computer Technology in the School of Engineering and Technology
at IUPUI. Dr. Jafari has presented at more than 100 national and international
conferences and published in professional and scholarly journals on a variety
of subjects in information technology as it relates to teaching and learning. Dr.
Jafari’s research interests include interface design, agent-based learning
environments, intelligent user interfaces and most recently Internet portals. Dr.
Jafari has initiated, directed and co-developed several major research and
development projects including the Interactive Multimedia Distribution System
(1997), the Oncourse enterprise course management system (1999) and the
Angel e-Learning Portal (2000). Professor Jafari’s new research and
development project is electronic portfolios, a new teaching and learning portal
environment to be built by a consortium of higher education institutions. For this
purpose he has initiated and established the ePort Consortium
(ePortConsortium.org).
Mark Sheehan (sheehan@montana.edu) is Executive Director for Information
Services and Chief Information Officer for Montana State University. In recent
years he has presented an introduction to portal technologies to audiences at
EDUCAUSE 2000, the 2000 and 2001 User Services Conferences of the
Special Interest Group for University and College Computer Services
(SIGUCCS) of the Association for Computing Machinery, and the 2001
annual meeting of the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium. Dr.
Sheehan writes frequently for such publications as EDUCAUSE Review,
EDUCAUSE Quarterly and ONLINE. In 1995 he won the UMI Excellence
in Writing Award for his article “Pulling the Internet Together with Mosaic,”
published in ONLINE.